Executive Briefing Programs…

For a variety of reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about Executive Briefing Programs this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them and EBP is one of those things where Company A invites its most valuable customers (usually on a 1-to-1 basis, so you’ll have a bunch of people from Company X) to a day of presentations about how Company A can help Company X.

When I first encountered the concept I assumed it was just a very fancy product demo or sales pitch. But it turns out - that yeah - while Company A will almost certainly make more money from Company X as a result of the EBP, if you approach it like a sales presentation you won’t get the full value out of it..

Essentially it’s real-world proof about the supremacy of the 4Cs of marketing over the 4Ps

The 4 Ps are the traditional way of looking at Marketing

Product: Defining the characteristics of your product or service to meet the customers’ needs.

Price: Deciding on a pricing strategy. Even if you decide not to charge for a service, it is useful to realise that this is still a pricing strategy. Identifying the total cost to the user (which is likely to be higher than the charge you make) is a part of the price element.

Promotion: This includes advertising, personal selling (eg attending exhibitions), sales promotions (eg special offers), and atmospherics (creating the right impression through the working environment). Public Relations is included within Promotion by many marketing people (though PR people tend to see it as a separate discipline).

Place: Looking at location (eg of a library) and where a service is delivered (eg are search results delivered to the user’s desktop, office, pigeonhole - or do they have to collect them).

As you can see - the 4Ps tale a very product focussed way of looking at the issue. The 4Cs take a more customer centric view…

• Place becomes Convenience
• Price becomes Cost to the user
• Promotion becomes Communication
• Product becomes Customer needs and wants

Modern marketing thinking says that if you take a customer centric view - you’ll be more successful - and the EBP experience would seem to bear that out. Traditional sales presentations are not particularly effective - but there’s pretty solid research that shows a good, customer focussed EBP can reduce the sales cycle by about 3 months - and identify, on average, 2 solid opportunities for up sell per meeting.

Now that’s measurable return on investment